A coworker of mine gave to me his laptop, wanting me to configure it for wireless access to the Internet. After handing it to me, he asked me "Can you install Ubuntu for me?" Um, ok, I can do that, but I am not an Ubuntu wizard so I expected this to be unfamiliar territory, to some extent.

I installed it, and it barfed. I am not sure why. I tried to install it again and it went just fine the second time around. I am not sure what went wrong the first time, so I have no idea what I can do to avoid the issue when/if I install it again later. Regardless, the goal was to get it up and running on my coworker's laptop.

My very first observation - sexy GUI! It is clear that the Ubuntu team has put a great deal of time and effort into making the GUI smooth, sleek and pretty. It makes the typical GNOME or KDE interface look kinda unpolished, even though both of those workspaces are attractive enough.

Working in the Red Hat world, I have gotten very used to the distinction between user accounts and root. I have never been a big fan of using sudo, and I expected Ubuntu's methodology of eliminating root logins to be cumbersome. What I did not expect was all of the utilities I need as root on Red Hat to be in the path for the user account and seem to work properly (so using sudo would not be a common occurrence for me). That is, I don't need to look in/sbin for administrator utilities on this system. 'ifconfig' is a prime example of a tool that is not in the default path of the average user on Red Hat installations but it in a different location and IS in the path for Ubuntu boxes.

I didn't realize that Ubuntu is a small distro. I also did not realize that it's a Debian derivative.

My first real contact with Ubuntu hasn't been all that bad. However, I am not so sure I would switch to it. I think I prefer Red Hat, at least for now.

I didn't realize that Ubuntu is a small distro. I also did not realize that it's a Debian derivative.

That really just shows that you really didn't know anything about Ubuntu. Not that it is something to be ashamed of, but I'd expect that you had known that by reading the numerous Ubuntu articles on this site.

I'm a full time Ubuntu user since.... a very long time. Both at work an at home. Both my mother and mother in law are converts. Well, it's that or I don't support them. Mom has been running it for

That really just shows that you really didn't know anything about Ubuntu. Not that it is something to be ashamed of, but I'd expect that you had known that by reading the numerous Ubuntu articles on this site.

I wouldn't quite say I knew *nothing*... I knew it was originally developed on the Isle of Man (and assume it still is), that root does not have a password by default and you have to use sudo to do admin stuff (there's a way around that), I knew there was a lot more configuration that's done for the us

Isle of Man?!? That, I never heard, and the wikipedia page doesn't mention it. Canonical is registered on the Isle of Man, but you can bet your ass there are no developers there. The reason to be registred on the Isle of Man is the same as to be in Luxembourg or Liechtenstein. Taxes.... For example, the European "HQ" of iTunes, Amazon and many others are here in Luxembourg. Except for a secretary and a manager (if it's not only a mailbox), they usually have no other workers. Try to learn differentiat

I have had really good experience with it thus far. I've found that there are a lot of Linux fans who just enjoy tinkering with the OS and getting it to run in a multitude of different ways on different types of hardware. For me though, it's just a tool. So having the Add/Remove Software feature makes my day. Especially with the wealth of programs out there. It lets me spend more time using the computer as a tool and not ahving to spend my time getting the computer just to doing what I want it to do.